“To become unified and concentrated upon itself, the being must break many sensible attachments.  To make itself one with others and give itself to them, it must encroach upon those intimate personal intellectual and emotional reserves that it most jealously guards.  To enter into a higher life, by centering itself upon another self, it must destroy its own preliminary unity.  This can mean only one thing, that at all levels of the formation of being, creative synthesis involves detachments — every aggregation being accompanied by a segregation.  The moral effect is necessarily accompanied by suffering and sacrifice.  That is why, in every moral condition, perfection is inseparable from suffering, and the highest life is attained through a dying.  Death (which means disintegration) accompanies every change for better or worse.  However, while in the case of some (which it leaves permanently disintegrated and diminished) the death is ad mortem, in the case of others (those it reintegrates as it disintegrates them) it is a transition . . . that leads to a new life.” — L’Union creatrice (December 1917) quoted in Cardinal Henri de Lubac “The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin” p. 53